I am not sure how approachable the above will be to a “rookie”, because I can only speak from my own experience. I read Drexler’s Engines of Creation, and Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near and was fascinated by these topics. I kept finding LessWrong on Google searches about them and I thought the writing was good (especially Three Worlds Collide). So after jumping around a bit as I discovered LessWrong in the first place, I read the original blog posts that went into R:AZ in pretty much the order written. I did end up downloading an ebook version of Eliezer’s posts to do it (not the slightly reorganized R:AZ ebook, which was not available at the time), which I read on my phone in my spare time.
In my opinion, you should at least try to read all of the R:AZ sequences, even though there are more than 9. It’s quite long, but you’ll get insights from it long before you finish.
There’s also some redundancy as the concepts build on each other. So if you’re struggling getting through an essay, I would say read it aloud and move on even if you don’t completely get it. (This might be easier with the audiobook.) Some essays are easier to read than others, and I think that some are more valuable than others.
If that’s still too much for you, I can try to point out the individual essays I think are especially important:
Raising the Sanity Waterline links to some critical earlier posts, which makes it a kind of mini-sequence. It’s also got a key insight in its own right: humans are insane, and this is not OK.
Beyond the Reach of God — Perhaps the most powerfully written essay in all of the Sequences. Nature is crushingly indifferent to human well-being. Everything is allowed to go horribly wrong. There are no guardrails until we build them ourselves.
You Only Live Twice — There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
I’m currently in Fake beliefs and, as you correctly said, more than half the times I don’t really get them. I think part of this is because EY wrote using such big words and complicated grammar that confuse non-native speakers.
However, I’m not a fan of jumping ships and will try to wade through R:A-Z before committing to another sequence. You convinced me! :) That said, HPMOR seems to be very appealing to beginners since it combine something new & strange (rationality) with something most of us are familiar with already (wizardry, lol).
I feel like I “got it” on a lot more than half of the essays. I’m a native speaker though. And both an American and enough of a nerd to get most of EY’s cultural references. Maybe slogging through is not the best approach for you. If a cursory search of LessWrong’s wiki, Wikipedia, and Google aren’t enough to understand an unfamiliar reference, you can try one of LessWrong’s chatrooms. I think the Freenode one is probably still active, but I haven’t been following it lately. And you can ask more questions in the open threads or with new question posts here on LessWrong proper.
HPMOR’s main purpose was to get people interested in rationality in the first place, so you maybe read the sequences and get on board with the mission. You’re already interested, so maybe HPMOR is less important. But another major benefit is that it conveys the experience of thinking like a rationalist in a way the sequences don’t. Because you put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes. And yeah, it’s both entertaining and enlightening. But again there were certain chapters I had trouble following. It also starts out kind of slow, so don’t give up before chapter 10. You say you are not a native speaker. I don’t know your preferred language, but there are a number of translations of HPMOR, a podcast/audiobook, and machinima videos.
If you’re looking for shortcuts, perhaps start with:
Facing the Singularity for the hope and peril that kicked off this whole movement. Smarter Than Us might go a little deeper.
Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners for the epistemic rationality and maybe
Hammertime for the instrumental rationality.
I am not sure how approachable the above will be to a “rookie”, because I can only speak from my own experience. I read Drexler’s Engines of Creation, and Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near and was fascinated by these topics. I kept finding LessWrong on Google searches about them and I thought the writing was good (especially Three Worlds Collide). So after jumping around a bit as I discovered LessWrong in the first place, I read the original blog posts that went into R:AZ in pretty much the order written. I did end up downloading an ebook version of Eliezer’s posts to do it (not the slightly reorganized R:AZ ebook, which was not available at the time), which I read on my phone in my spare time.
In my opinion, you should at least try to read all of the R:AZ sequences, even though there are more than 9. It’s quite long, but you’ll get insights from it long before you finish.
There’s also some redundancy as the concepts build on each other. So if you’re struggling getting through an essay, I would say read it aloud and move on even if you don’t completely get it. (This might be easier with the audiobook.) Some essays are easier to read than others, and I think that some are more valuable than others.
If that’s still too much for you, I can try to point out the individual essays I think are especially important:
Raising the Sanity Waterline links to some critical earlier posts, which makes it a kind of mini-sequence. It’s also got a key insight in its own right: humans are insane, and this is not OK.
Beyond the Reach of God — Perhaps the most powerfully written essay in all of the Sequences. Nature is crushingly indifferent to human well-being. Everything is allowed to go horribly wrong. There are no guardrails until we build them ourselves.
You Only Live Twice — There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
I’m currently in Fake beliefs and, as you correctly said, more than half the times I don’t really get them. I think part of this is because EY wrote using such big words and complicated grammar that confuse non-native speakers.
However, I’m not a fan of jumping ships and will try to wade through R:A-Z before committing to another sequence. You convinced me! :) That said, HPMOR seems to be very appealing to beginners since it combine something new & strange (rationality) with something most of us are familiar with already (wizardry, lol).
I feel like I “got it” on a lot more than half of the essays. I’m a native speaker though. And both an American and enough of a nerd to get most of EY’s cultural references. Maybe slogging through is not the best approach for you. If a cursory search of LessWrong’s wiki, Wikipedia, and Google aren’t enough to understand an unfamiliar reference, you can try one of LessWrong’s chatrooms. I think the Freenode one is probably still active, but I haven’t been following it lately. And you can ask more questions in the open threads or with new question posts here on LessWrong proper.
HPMOR’s main purpose was to get people interested in rationality in the first place, so you maybe read the sequences and get on board with the mission. You’re already interested, so maybe HPMOR is less important. But another major benefit is that it conveys the experience of thinking like a rationalist in a way the sequences don’t. Because you put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes. And yeah, it’s both entertaining and enlightening. But again there were certain chapters I had trouble following. It also starts out kind of slow, so don’t give up before chapter 10. You say you are not a native speaker. I don’t know your preferred language, but there are a number of translations of HPMOR, a podcast/audiobook, and machinima videos.